I think if you want a "doughier" biscuit you'd knead them to get the gluten up to make it a bit less flakey. I'll say these were really good biscuits and I didn't get any complaints. We did spicey hot sausage with coon gravey my husband whipped up. I'm not entirely sure what coon gravey is as it's a Southern thing and I am a mear Yankee He may never tell me the secret!

to the commenter above:
you've made the wrong substitutions
i'm 41 years old and learned how to make biscuits when i was very young. when my grandmother first allowed me to participate, i was so small i had to stand in a chair.
and one of the things i have learned is that biscuits are not health food, lol. you cannot expect to achieve a light & fluffy end result by using margarine or 2% milk. such a substitution would have the old southern ladies gasping with shock.
michael has a very good recipe here that shouldn't require a lot of revision. the only difference in his recipe and my gran's is that she almost always used buttermilk with a pinch of baking soda to cut it. and she never used a cutter. in my family we just flour our hands, pinch off a dough ball & softly roll it in hand before putting it in the pan. the final step before baking (and i don't do this) was to take a small spoon & dip some bacon fat to spread over the tops. this brings about the same effect as brushing with butter.
i'm flummoxed over why so many readers are argumentative about what should go in/on/with a biscuit. it's all a matter of taste & in my family, the tastes range from butter & syrup, to gravy, homemade preserves, or a breakfast meat sandwich. ultimately, who cares how you eat it? i've lived all over the world and i've never once baked biscuits for someone who didn't find a way to enjoy them!
*now - do any of you helpful readers have a good recipe for "cathead" biscuits? my other grandmother used to make this variation (another deep south biscuit). while still remaining light (not too heavily dense) in texture, they were a much larger & flatter biscuit - about the size of a cat's haed, hence the name. these biscuits had a stronger flavor of baking soda and were perfect with the tomato gravy she served with breakfast. sadly, she died when i was 12 so i never got the recipe.*

I'm rather a biscuit snob and I think folks here did a great job of talking about what all you can do to a biscuit (use cream or butter instead of buttermilk and shortening you get it)...Here's my tips 1.) the less you mess with the dough the better (I prefer a large spoon of dough in rolled in flour and gently shaped to any kneading or rolling action) 2.) the best way to incorporate the fat into the flour is by hand, squeezing and squeezing until the fat bits are small and very flat 3.) use very fresh baking powder (I buy a new can a month) and last...the flour. In my view to make the most dependably reliable biscuits you've got to get a very light flour preferrably made from winter wheat, like white lilly. It will amaze you at the difference it'll make in your biscuits.

Try two cups self rising white lilly flour, 1/4 cup of vegatable shortening (these days you can use healthy stuff, or go for the gusto and try lard), 3/4 cups buttermilk. Follow the hints above and bake in a very hot oven (500) until nicely browned.

One last thing, about leftovers (doesn't happen often round our place) I didn't see a sugar biscuit though ...take last night's leftover biscuits, cut open and lay on butter to and sugar to the cut sides and broil until the butter has melted and sugar starts to brown

to the commenter above:
you've made the wrong substitutions
i'm 41 years old and learned how to make biscuits when i was very young. when my grandmother first allowed me to participate, i was so small i had to stand in a chair.
and one of the things i have learned is that biscuits are not health food, lol. you cannot expect to achieve a light & fluffy end result by using margarine or 2% milk. such a substitution would have the old southern ladies gasping with shock.
michael has a very good recipe here that shouldn't require a lot of revision. the only difference in his recipe and my gran's is that she almost always used buttermilk with a pinch of baking soda to cut it. and she never used a cutter. in my family we just flour our hands, pinch off a dough ball & softly roll it in hand before putting it in the pan. the final step before baking (and i don't do this) was to take a small spoon & dip some bacon fat to spread over the tops. this brings about the same effect as brushing with butter.
i'm flummoxed over why so many readers are argumentative about what should go in/on/with a biscuit. it's all a matter of taste & in my family, the tastes range from butter & syrup, to gravy, homemade preserves, or a breakfast meat sandwich. ultimately, who cares how you eat it? i've lived all over the world and i've never once baked biscuits for someone who didn't find a way to enjoy them!
*now - do any of you helpful readers have a good recipe for "cathead" biscuits? my other grandmother used to make this variation (another deep south biscuit). while still remaining light (not too heavily dense) in texture, they were a much larger & flatter biscuit - about the size of a cat's haed, hence the name. these biscuits had a stronger flavor of baking soda and were perfect with the tomato gravy she served with breakfast. sadly, she died when i was 12 so i never got the recipe.*

Don't know about cat head biscuits...but I would greatly appreciate a good tomatoe gravy recipe?

What is the equivalent or approximate equivalent in grams of the 2 cups of flour used in this recipe?

Great question! Unfortunately, this was one of my earlier articles and I didn't diligently record the mass of the flour back then. I also know that I often don't bother to sift the flour when I scoop for biscuits - so that'll be around 160 g per cup. Call it at 320 g total.

I had never heard of Cat Head biscuits before today. I came across a recipe while searching for a fluffy biscuit recipe. Here is the link to that site. It also says you may use tomato juice in the recipe, which sounds like it would go well with the "tomato gravy" you are looking for...did not see a recipe for the tomato gravy though.

For those of you who want a very high biscuit, you need to be careful how you cut the dough.
Use of a sharp knife, or a sharp edged can (NOT a dull or rounded edge, whatever you use) can make the difference between flat or high. A dull edge can seal the sides which doesnt allow for optimum loft. A sharp cut keeps the sides of the dough with open "cells" that can expand more.

Also, make sure that you use double acting baking powder, as baking powder begins working immediately upon exposure to liquid. Wait too long and when they go in to the oven, there's nothing to work on the rise. D.A. powder responds to heat.

My family has lived in Alabama for over 200 years. Cooking is in our genes and biscuits is cooking 101. I always use self risin flour and lard not butter, and always use buttermilk, then use your hands to mix the flour with the lard then gently mix in the buttermilk. Mix till all ingredients are moist then turn out on a lightly floured board and shape into a long bread roll then pinch off a portion at a time, lightly flour your hand then shape into a small round biscuit and place in a cake pan. This is critical because you want your biscuit to rise hig and if you put it on a cookie sheet it will spread out and not up!! Bake in a 400-425 oven until done, do not overbake it causes dry biscuits.

I like to make my biscuits by rolling the dough out to about 1/4 of an inch, then folding it back on top of itself to make a 1/2 inch layered dough. Cut your biscuits out of that. Then, when they are ready to be eaten after baking, they split right in half so you can either cover them in gravy, stuff them with jelly or butter, even add a slice of thick ham.

/And use buttermilk...if you don't have buttermilk, use one tablespoon of lemon juice + 1 cup of milk and let sit for 5 minutes or so

This is not a comment about your biscuit recipe, which looks good enough to try, but about two other comments.

Scones do have sugar, and so are somewhat sweet. They are also shorter than biscuits, which means they crumble easier. They typically, though not always, call for a lot more baking powder, so much more, in some cases, that you can taste it in the finished product.

The comment about cane sugar being called 'surguhm' is partly correct. I remember when I was a boy, we could buy cans of what my dad called 'sorghum molasses', or 'blackstrap' (this was in Texas in the 1950s). We'd typically get it from a roadside stand in cans that were, as I recall, essentially the same as quart-size paint cans. The syrup is not as dark as store-bought molasses, but way thicker. It looked much like very high-viscosity differential oil. It tasted very close to molasses, but not exactly.

I found out later that this was not made strictly from sorghum, but from cane or ribbon cane, with some sorghum syrup in it.